Data belonging to the thesis intitled "Prosody in Language Contact. French and Vietnamese"

This dataset belongs to our doctoral thesis intitled "Prosody in Language Contact. French and Vietnamese". The dataset contains recordings of oral data as well as tables of written data, transcriptions and annotations. It also contains metadata about oral and written data. Detailed information about this data and how to understand it can be taken from our thesis.

In the thesis, we are dealing with prosodic language contact between the languages Vietnamese and French. Our research is devoted to different language contact situations as well as to both directions of language contact. The starting point of our experimental research is the observation of French loanwords in Vietnamese. In this context, we examine prosodic adaptation patterns that speakers have undertaken to adapt the loanwords to Vietnamese. The focus is on the repair of structures that are illicit in Vietnamese: Consonants in certain positions in the syllable are replaced or deleted, consonant clusters are dissolved by epenthesis or by deletion of one of the two consonants, syllable boundaries are shifted, consonants or consonant slots in certain syllabic structures are doubled, and tones are assigned to syllables according to certain patterns.

The aim of our experimental investigations then is to find out whether similar or different patterns occur in an instantaneous situation of language contact. Monolingual speakers of Vietnamese are exposed to French stimuli and asked to reproduce them in three different conditions. We have additionally conducted the same experiment with learners of French whose first language is Vietnamese. The experimental data show many similar patterns to the loanword data. However, the data from monolingual speakers in particular display much more variability. Finally, we reverse the direction of language contact: Native speakers of French are asked to reproduce Vietnamese stimuli. In this case, the question is whether certain patterns can be reversed in the opposite direction, which can partly be observed.

With the help of the present work, we can gain a deep understanding of systematicity and variability in borrowing and second language acquisition. We conclude that from a phonological perspective, there are many similarities between the two fields of prosodic language contact, and we suggest, for the phenomena under consideration, to understand some aspects in their complexity in a gradual rather than a categorical way.